Qt: Collaboration Between The Mobile Platforms Is On!

2013 has already got exciting for the mobile platform space, with Jolla showing more and more demos and Ubuntu telling us about their plans of running Ubuntu on the phone. These two have something common with KDE’s Plasma Active project – and I’m sure you’ve guessed, its about using Qt and QtQuick for the platform and applications.

While to most people the three might look like fierce competition, there has been lot of collaboration and healthy discussion going around in the community. For instance, Aaron Seigo posted today about how Jolla and Ubuntu developers are coming together and discussing about QML Components in the same public channel which hosts discussions around Plasma Active. If you hadn’t seen this earlier, QML Components are a way to specify a common specification of the UI elements. What this basically means is that while each platform will have different look’n’feel for their UI elements, they will programatically be accessible in the same way.

Well known Qt programmer and author, Johan Thelin also wrote about all these platforms (including the Blackberry 10) coming together and using Qt to create the next gen beautiful UIs. You can read his post here.

And this is just one thing, there have been discussions about using common strategies for application deployment, formats etc. This sounds very exciting if you think about the possibilities when a group of talented and smart people would come together and share their ideas about the new mobile platform that the users will see.